Please your input on how to set the type for an original instrumental work of modern music

@Freso please remove this post after read.

I think you meant:

It’s not the use of vocals in traditional music that distinguishes a traditional song from a traditional tune, it’s whether or not it has vocals lyrics.

A song is a much more specific thing than “instrumental” is. Even if we decided not to use it for popular music, we would still need it for, say, Schubert’s Ständchen:

A song is not the same as an aria, same as a sonata is not the same as a partita. Both song and aria would be under a “vocal” type if we added that, same as both sonata and partita would be under an “instrumental” type.

It’s a work, and it happens to be instrumental. Not every work needs to have a type!

:thinking: :question:

:thinking:

Well but when a release does have no barcodes, we can set it as No barcodes.
There is no explicit No types for works. :slight_smile:


:open_mouth: :exclamation:

Oh! Or that means the Lyrics Languages attribute can already cover everything then with language(s) (has lyrics, songs), other/artificial (humming) and no lyrics (instrumentals)!

Maybe we could rename Type to Classical type and all non‐NGS works would not need type.
Because for non-NGS, types are rather genres maybe.
I don’t know I don’t use genres but I see my instrumental tag ended up being among genre tags - but of course not my inst. nor instr. tags. :sweat_smile:

Yeah but unless that is made glaringly obvious when creatating/editing a work this will always result in a whole lot of miscategorized works.
I have created about 3500 works in the database to date and until recently never once though that the “song” type was not the correct type. But since almost all of these works either contain no lyrics or the lyrics are rapped and not sung (so something between song and poem) I entered them all wrong.

Well since we established that “instrumental” has nothing to do with whether there are vocals or not I’d rather make the super-types “lyrical” and “non-lyrical”.

That’s because leaving it empty doesn’t mean it necessarily doesn’t have anything that can be called a type. A currently empty work might be a polka, or a jig - those are not currently work types but I could see them being work types. The main problem there really is where to make the distinction between genre and work type.

I’m just not seeing much use on having a type so generic as “instrumental”, honestly - it doesn’t tell you anything about what kind of work it is, just tells you it has no lyrics (as opposed to Aria or Sonata or Poem). In classical an art song / Lied is more-or-less a clear thing, but in popular music a rap song vs a pop song vs a death metal song are actually quite different, which does move “Song” closer to that same “doesn’t mean anything” level. An option would indeed be to say “non-classical works shouldn’t have types”, but given Song was requested partially by people who wanted to not have to leave all their work types empty, that might make people unhappy too :smiley: